I've spent quite some time reviewing this proposed update for 16.04.
This is a "soft reject" from me, pending further discussion if you'd
like to address any of the comments I've made below. If there is no
further discussion, I'll reject this upload from the queue when I next
come past.

I appreciate the value of bumping LyX up to an upstream stable
maintenance release. However, I am concerned that there doesn't seem to
be enough quality assurance here to ensure that existing, happy LyX
users using the packaging from 16.04 are not regressed.

16.04 has been out for three years now, and I see only a handful of bugs
reported against this package since then that are still open. On
balance, I question whether there's value in issuing this update
wholesale now, given that most users will be moving over to 18.04 before
long. I could be swayed if there appeared to be a significant number of
Ubuntu users needing this update, but I don't see that. An alternative
approach is to address specific fixes aimed at bugs Ubuntu 16.04 users
are actually experiencing using our regular SRU process. It looks like
these would be fairly easy cherry-pickable from upstream VCS and we
could have far more confidence in individual testing to reduce
regression risk to unaffected Ubuntu users.

Specifically:

The lyx2lyx update is presumably for the headline "ability to read and
write files in the 2.2.x format" but this also appears to have no tests
and landed upstream as unannotated megacommits.

As far as I can see, only four tests run during the package build.

The bugfixes in the 2.1 branch relevant to this update do not appear to
come with regression tests.

The embedded version of Boost is bumped with no explanation as to why
this is needed, which I find concerning because that seems counter to
the idea of minimising regression risk. The use of --without-included-
boost may mitigate this but needs checking that it works. Changes
relating to the newer version of Boost have been made upstream, but if
--without-included-boost is working, then they will apply to the build
in Ubuntu without the Boost being built against having been updated.

In general, there seem to be a fairly large number of changes made
upstream with little verification possible except with manual testing.
I'm not sure we should be throwing these at existing Ubuntu LyX users
without actually doing that testing. Accordingly, with the information I
have my (quite subjective) opinion is that our regular cherry-picking
SRU process would be more appropriate here.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1595358

Title:
  [SRU] Update to maintenance release 2.1.5 in Xenial

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